page_title: Michael Bielický
section_title: Works: In Between Video and Media Installations
hierarchical_section_title: Michael Bielický / Works: In Between Video and Media Installations
caption_attribution_description: English: software (Java), projectors, old iron mill
context_page_description: Michael Bielicky is a Czech-German media artist. He is professor at the department of digital media at the University of Arts and Design / Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in Karlsruhe. His work Menora/Inventur is the first ever acquired work by the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in its founding year of 1989 by its founder Heinrich Klotz. The Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe is the first museum worldwide to focus on media exhibitions since its founding year.
context_section_description: In 1986 »Perpetuum Mobile« was one of Michael Bielicky's first video works produced in Düsseldorf. Bielicky tried to reinvent his artistic practice along major technical cornerstones, starting with Stop Motion, via U-Matic, Time base correction with DOC (Drop-out compensator) to GPS, the Internet and real-time data and provoked and documented the aesthetic errors of the specter in the machine, in parallel and in contradiction to the ongoing technical refinement process of the media industry. 
  In the 1980s he developed unintended techniques with the first digital video editing machines to alter, distort and rearrange his video material, akin to his mentor Nam June Paik's debut exhibition in 1963, where Paik used magnets to distort his own television-set-based exhibits. Works like Four Seasons (1984), Circulus Viciosus (1985) and Paik-Hat (1986) are disturbing linear narrative traditions through cutting techniques and stop motion alone, whereas Perpetuum Mobile (1986), Next Year in Jerusalem (1988) and Golem is Alive (1989) introduce digital editing techniques to create videos, that appear to be haunted by the specters of early East European media culture.
  In 1989, the same year Golem is Alive is released, Michael Bielicky expands the two-dimensional screen into the exhibition space. With his Menorah/Inventur (1989) he does away with the screen-frames in an intent to dissolve those in a symbolically powerful sculpture, one of the main symbols of Jewish religion. One year later, in 1990, he does away with the religious symbolism and houses his videos in the most universal scientific and technical symbol, the spiral:
  "One can walk through the spiral-like tunnel. At the end of that tunnel is a black sphere (the somewhere). A small TV transmitter transmits the information (in the form of a flame) to the carrier, the spiral, and the receivers (TVs). Information always moves through time and space in the same form. It always has the form of the spiral. The sounds of human language move through space in the same way as our solar system moves through the universe. We store information on a computer disc in a spiral form, as we do on a videotape.
  
  The Name (1990), which is technically akin to Menorah/Inventur (the small televisions are receivers for a video source nearby, fire and screens are intertwined as a symbol of and a mean of communication), is the attempt to balance technical expertise and historic cultural mystery in one work of art. Bielicky tries to unmask technology as one Metanarrative among many.
  In 1987 Bielicky examines the destruction of Joseph Beuys's Fettecke (Fat Corner) in collaboration with Ricardo Peredo Wende. The resulting documentary video sculpture is a who is who of Beuys's students and disciples, as well as a cascade of partly absurd, partly fascinating explanations, why and how this case of a janitor's utter ignorance for art has implications for the future of art as a whole.
   A technologically pioneering project, Bielicky sets out to inscribe the biblical Exodus route into the prototype of what we all have come to know as the internet. Calling it a tele-performance in 1995, Bielicky and al. - equipped with a Jeep stacked with what was high-end technology in 1995 - set out to track the Exodus route in the Negev desert, collecting GPS data and storing it on one of the first websites as they go. That project, at the very junction of religion and narrative technology, marks a turning point in Bielicky's work. Technology is not mystified by specters anymore, the equilibrium reached with The Name (1990) tips in favor of technology: Bielicky literally traces the biblical history of Jewish culture scientifically.
  In 1994 he begins to experiment with GPS in an art context: his work Intelligent Mailman (1994) is the first of its kind worldwide and marks the onset of numerous foundational research projects on interactive media art (see: Works: Proceedings and Foundations).
  
  Since 2005 - in cooperation with Kamila B. Richter - Bielicky develops web-based, often interactive projects, controlled by real-time data f
caption: Data Steel, Colours of Ostrava. Software (Java), projectors, old iron mill
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